


Filling the Void

by Marie_L



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Despair, Everyone is Dead, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2019-01-07 23:20:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12242601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marie_L/pseuds/Marie_L
Summary: In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth. In the end, the Darkness destroyed them. And in between, there is Dean.





	Filling the Void

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RoseFrederick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoseFrederick/gifts).



Hell wasn’t what it used to be, Dean could say with authority. Actually, official Hell had been eaten eons ago, obliterated and absorbed into the sea-depth crushing unity that was the Darkness. Before Amara got around to it, Dean would have guessed that Hell couldn’t have been made any darker, and the nutjob narcissist now ruling Earth’s corner of the cosmos would have left it alone as a shrine to evil and anti-light. But no, Amara considered it to be another manifestation of her sibling’s flawed works, hardly any different from Heaven, Purgatory, and Earth itself.

And honestly, having formerly been one of the few beings to ever sample all four of those worlds, there was a part of Dean that could see the thread of an angry and imperfect God coursing through every one of those realms. That He had tried to create something beautiful, unique and good in the initial creation of Heaven and Earth — the original forms to develop out of his light — but it had all crumbled to internal flaws almost immediately, and birthed the decidedly more horrific mirror realms of Hell and Purgatory in the process. Dean and Sam had just been unlucky enough to be born at the end of a bad project winding down, collapsing in on itself down to death throes even before Amara had showed up to finish the job.

God had given up on them early on, Dean now knew. Amara had hunted for him through every corner of this particular creation, including every molecule of Dean’s own body and soul, and found only slight traces of the deity who, like a bad CEO, had cashed in his bonus, retired to Bermuda and left a fake email address behind for the few followers who wished to remember him. Dean guessed God had fled to some other dimension and was busily pissing out terrible ideas on that realm too. Sometimes, in his own anger and imperfection, Dean wondered why in the hell He hadn’t just let Amara out of her prison right then, at that fateful moment of departure, and let her roll the wrecking ball She so obviously wanted to crush over every photon of her neglectful sibling’s magnum opus.

_In the beginning, when They began to create Heaven and Earth_ _— the earth being unformed and void, with Light over the face of the deep and the Spirit of Amara sweeping over the water — She said,_ _“let there be Darkness,” and there was Darkness. And God saw that the Darkness was good._

Some things were stillborn even before they began.

Sometimes Dean wondered if he was turning crazy too, narcissism optional and possibly a coping mechanism. Whatever shreds were left of him, that is. Humor, wit and the illusion of brain cells were apparently degrading in this Dean Shadow Ghost Number 494, or whatever number resurrection they were on.

She occasionally remembered he was still there, still conscious on the blind remnant of Earth by way of her demented grace. Amara had been fascinated with him from the beginning, a fact that Dean and Sam had not capitalized on to anywhere near the degree to which they could have. At that point they were still thinking of her as an ordinary monster with extraordinary powers, to be hunted down or captured through the usual means of magical exploitation of weakness. A God-level being with the power to eat whole solar systems was hard to grok. But their bigger failure was their lack of understanding what the whole soul-abortion, possessed baby, speed-grow-as-human business had been about. It was her test run of the Light, an exploration of God’s creation, and she had found it to be awful, in no way superior to anything she could have come up with. This was the point of weakness they had missed, for if Dean had taken her then — not to destroy, for he now knew that was impossible, but to raise and teach — he might have been able to instill in her respect for the good of the world, and maybe even love, which was not incompatible with Darkness. He might have directed her fearsome powers towards imaginative repair of their broken creation, with the thought that She could do better. Instead it all went to shit, and finally settled down to nothing.

Dean lay down, and felt the cold rock underneath his imaginary back. The fact that he couldn’t see was no longer horrifying, for he had accepted the fact that light no longer existed. Neither did his body of course, but she allowed the mental projection of it, since a sense of body turned out to be vital for a human being’s consciousness. He’d known this from his various forays into Hell and Heaven, realms where bodies didn’t exist and yet you could be tortured or make love just the same. Now some frozen matter still existed, but everything alive — every bug, demon, leaf, amoeba, angel, flu virus, chicken, skinwalker, and human soul — everything animated that God had ever touched — had been consumed and macerated by Amara’s voracious appetite.

Earlier Dean thought of it as absorption, but that was not quite right, for it implied that the objects being sucked in influenced her somehow, that in turn She could change and contain the universe within her being. She’d implied that, by trying to sell that whole “Oneness in me” crap back when the world existed. Dean now knew the truth. They was all nothing but food. One of these days she might shit out a new Earth, recycling materials from the old, but Dean’s only fervent desire now was to cease to exist before that moment. He wanted to be eaten too.

Sometimes, when Amara did remember him and popped in for metaphysical chat, it was worse than when she forgot about him at all. Her connection with him tended to remind her of humanity and her short experience as a human, and then she felt a weird sort of pity for him, like someone keeping a pet rat in a tiny cage, who is occasionally self-aware enough to reflect that the rat’s more fulfilling existence would probably be out in the sewers rummaging through garbage. But their own demented love of the rat prevents any release, and after ineffectually petting it for a few minutes, they latch the door and leave it in its sterile confines.

One time, after Dean had been blind long enough to forget what sight and light looked like, she remembered Sam. And she had created a better cage for him, one not unlike a fucked-up Heaven, complete with a recreation of the Bunker and a zombie brother happily sitting there doing research on how track down the only monster Amara could think of, God. Unfortunately she didn’t mind-tweak Dean to forget everything but this new abomination of a world, despite having eaten all the wise angels who could have told her that the selling a reality for human souls was, as they say, context dependent. Amara never did master the fine points of the human psyche, or any points for that matter.

“Dean!” Sam had said, jumping up from his fake chair in front of his fake books with a fake smile. “I think I’ve found something! Here, take a look.” After the instant glimpse of the scene, Dean had collapsed into a molten pile, flailing to cover his fake eyes, for even the shadowed projection of light was too much to bear. And he screamed then, begging again and again for the first time in unknown millennium for her to make it stop, and put him back in the quiet box on the lifeless Earth, where all his friends and loved ones were gone and the act of memory was on his own terms. In the beginning he had begged plenty for many things, but that was eons ago. He’d long passed anger and bargaining, and the remaining slivers of his spirit hovered on the quiet border of depression and acceptance.

She had complied, and sulked off for a long while after her benevolence went unappreciated. Sometimes he wondered why she didn’t keep a few other souls around just for vanity’s sake, but, in truth, she didn’t care about any other soul’s opinion.

“Make up your own souls then,” he muttered later -- it was impossible to tell when, for she had eaten time too. He hadn’t engaged in speech in forever, soul-screaming begging aside, but it was more a matter of mental will than any act of vocal cords.

“Like what?” she replied, and he jumped. He still couldn’t see, for there was no light, yet could nevertheless perceive her there in her adult human form. “I’m bored,” she added.

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have eaten the whole universe like a glutton,” he told her. “Say what you will about God’s crappy inventions, at least it wasn’t boring.”

“I think I should make my own creations,” she said. “But if I do, and I make them perfect, won’t it still be boring? Won’t I know exactly what will happen, for every moment of my creation’s existence? Maybe this was the root of my brother’s flawed worlds. Maybe he didn’t want to know what would happen.”

“The dilemma of a demigod. Why are you asking me, Amara? Like I’m going to have any answers? Even if I did, wouldn’t it be derived from the same old flaws you wanted to destroy?”

“I have no one else to ask.” She picked up a piercingly cold rock, crushed it, and let it drop. He heard the pebbles crumble over the landscape, collecting still and without wind.

“Make a fresh start, Amara.” He tried to muster up some conviction to go with the words, out of his drowned apathy. “My soul and the stones are the only things left besides You. Take us too, and begin again.”

Dean had made this argument countless times before. The words had been among the begging, and among the anger, and among his prayers from despair. He’d never truly prayed for anything except for that. And the truth was he had done it even before Amara, back in Hell, back in Purgatory. His deepest secret — sometimes back on Earth. He’d never had the courage to do it himself, and for most of his existence killing himself would have been a futile act. One of his darkest realizations was that no one ever really died, souls were merely shuttled from one miserable world to another. At least Amara had the power to make it truly end.

“You keep asking that,” the Darkness said. “But then I will be alone. Just like I was for all existence, shut away from my brother’s Creation. A self-imposed prison.”

“You got to learn that all of life is a prison,” Dean said. “Either live it in whatever way has meaning for you, or end it. But cut the crap with this torturous in-between, bemoaning how you’re the real victim here. Big bang it for real, and watch what happens. At least our deadbeat God taught us one thing, nobody’s forcing you to stick around.”

She reached out her illusion of a hand, and stroked his illusion of a face. He hadn’t been touched in so long, it was only a ghost of a memory of a sensation. But still, he could call it good.

“Goodbye then, Dean,” Amara said, sadly and with love, and opened her mouth to consume him for the last time.

 

 


End file.
